


Dear hearts and gentle people

by lilith_morgana



Category: Fallout 4
Genre: F/M, Gen, Multi
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-11-13
Updated: 2015-12-29
Packaged: 2018-05-01 11:45:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 4,654
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5204654
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lilith_morgana/pseuds/lilith_morgana
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Chronological drabbles and ficlets about Stella Martin, sole survivor of Vault 111.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Dance me to the end of love

  
There had been a field there once, somewhere below the hills where they'd built modern family homes in a fit of celebratory frenzy unaware of any endings. White picket fences, upgraded with bots and nanotech; the Suburban Dream gone  _wild_.   
  
Nate had proposed to her right here, kneeling in the mud with his hands shaking slightly around the small box. She'll always wonder if he had expected her to turn him down or if she would have, had she landed that job in New York. He's a local guy, made for exactly this. What  _she's_  made for she doesn't really know but there's a sting of sorrow whenever she thinks about that law firm deep in the heart of the massive city, the possibility that never was.   
  
”I used to play in that field,” he had said later, arms around her and her chin against his shoulder; he had nodded towards the construction site. Expanded neighborhood, the mayor has promised. Luxury homes for the lucky.   
  
“Did you now?” She had only half-listened, had never managed to muster up much interest for childhood nostalgia and long-winded memories. Then is then, now is now and she wants the future.  _I didn't know any better, I'm sorry._  
  
  
\--  
  
  
There had been a field there once, one where Shaun could have played. But theirs is not a time for open fields; it's a time for clear lines and well-defined structure and she prefers it, has always preferred it over the untamed and unknown. As they stand there, quietly sentimental with their newborn son, watching the fireworks from a safe distance, Stella reaches for Nate's hand. Her manicured nails across his knuckles, the pad of his broad thumb rubbing her wedding band as if he wants to clean it, make it just a little bit shinier.   
  
It's  _enough_ , more than she would have thought and more than she needs, but she doesn't tell him that. She just tilts her head towards him and smiles.   
  
  
\--  
  
  
There had been a field there once, a world, a  _life_. Now it's nothing.   
  
Now, with the low, persistent crackling in the air – such a  _soft_  sound, she wonders if she's the only one who can hear it but there's no one to ask – and the wasteland surrounding her from every direction, she kneels on the familiar spot. Their spot.   
  
Her hands shake, only slightly, when she places the wedding ring in the ground and brushes dust and stones over it. The matching one, carrying its dents and bruises, remains on her finger.  _Always by your side_ the inscription says. Nate had picked the phrase and Stella had bit down on a cynical, sarcastic reply. She's glad for it now. Glad for a lot of held-back retorts to his romantic gestures, for dates and flowers and kisses in the rain. For Shaun.   
  
“I will tear this fucking world apart,” she vows now, leaning over the tiny grave that will have to do because her husband will never have a proper one. “If that's what it takes.”  
  
In the distance, a dog barks. 


	2. Out of time

  
_Sanctuary Hills_  
  
  
  
It's a new language, this life.  
  
A different alphabet with another rhythm, hard and cruel like some odd biblical punishment brought down on the world for their collective sins, strange and unimaginable like the kind of futuristic fiction her friend Jen had always poured her soul into back in college. She used to claim Stella was only interested in plain, boring reality and that, Stella thinks sometimes as she crouches behind a dumpster somewhere out in the Commonwealth, trying to remain unnoticed as she picks up some ammo from the ground and thanks Nate silently for teaching her how to handle a gun _just in case, sweetheart,_ might definitely have been true once.  
  
These days, who the hell knows what anyone is interested in. It hardly matters. Since the dawn of time people have claimed it's hard to crush the human spirit, but those guys hadn't seen the apocalypse, she's pretty sure about _that_.  
  
So many new things to learn. Cities within the city, groups and organizations, scattered formations among the survivors, codes, deciphered secrets and hardened lies.  
  
So much bullshit they had been fed. Still are fed, for all she knows.  
  
So much language to re-learn.  
  
A new word for _night_ , that special moment right before it goes dark when every color is softened against the sky, seconds of peace before she starts listening for those new noises in the dark, the scraping, shuffling terrors that move faster in shadows.  
  
A new word for home, for history, for memory. Who are you – who _can_ you be – when you wake up to a world that no longer remembers you?  
  
A new word for _family_ , those tiny little imprints of others on your skin, in your heart, wrapped tight around your bones. The gasping, starved baby noises Shaun makes whenever he's hungry and the content grunting afterward, warm and soft in her arms. Nate's low voice – _I think he's asleep_ – and tucked-in grin, full of promises, of future.  
  
“You're tied to this place, kid.” Mama Murphy looks at her over the makeshift cooking station outside Mr and Mrs Henderson's ruined house. “Your energy.”  
  
Stella looks at her feet, at the crumbled walls around them, thinks about barbecue parties and cocktails at the veranda, day after day made up of the kind of leisured lifestyle she had never been content with back then but longs for now. To put on a nice, well-ironed dress and some makeup, smile just the right amount – no teeth, no vulgarities, _try not to be so glum and sarcastic will you_ – and discuss inoffensive, meaningless topics for a couple of hours. Everyone had thought they deserved to forget the rest of the world for a while, figured they'd earned some peace and quiet.  
  
“Yeah,” she admits. “I used to live here. A long time ago.”  
  
That's the part that cuts her to shreds whenever she allows herself to think about. All the years, all the _fucking_ _years_ that have passed while they have been trapped in stasis. Decontamination, they had said. Repeated it over and over like they had needed to convince their subjects and themselves. She should have asked to see documentation, contracts, anything on paper.  
  
She's a _lawyer_ ; she should have thought about these things.  
  
She's a _mother_ ; she should have held on to Shaun and never allowed him to leave her arms.  
  
“Not your fault what happened, kid.” Mama Murphy, eerily in tune with everybody's private thoughts, places a plate in front of her, nodding at the questionable stew. “Sturges claims he's found a way to make radroaches taste like melon.”  
  
Stella makes a face as Sturges himself joins them at the table on the patio.  
  
“That's because you use three melons for every radroach,” he says and grins at his own comment. "Drown the bastards."  
  
She's just barely got used to the knowledge that everything that surrounds them is dangerous, every piece of food and drink demanding careful strategic consideration - a full belly versus possible radiation poisoning and she's so _tired_ of being nauseated, that low-key _itch_ inside of her whenever she's been exposed for too long, endured too much. The world she woke up to is trying to kill her and there's no choice but to learn how to stand it.  
  
A couple of days ago now and she had spent hours on the sofa in this house, biting back the blinding, stabbing pain from a still unhealed gunshot wound right through her shoulder, an infected dog bite on her left thigh. It had taken several stimpacks and some other, unnamed, injections before she could even find enough energy to _talk_. Preston had asked - just once and in the lightest, least intrusive tone – where the hell she had meant to go. She had replied with a shrug that had to serve as a poorly constructed mask for the wordless, speechless grief she felt then, feels now: Diamond City. He hadn't replied, hadn't mentioned it again but his hand had lingered on her shoulder long after he finished helping dress her wound.  
  
Stella takes a deep breath.  
  
One bite of the radroach stew. One gulp of the sweet-and-sour ale Sturges makes himself in one of the unclaimed houses. _Hey, better than dirty water._ It hits her, again and again, that these people know nothing else. To them this filthy patio has never been sparkling clean and crowded with modern luxuries. The neighbors next door have never arranged garden parties or Sunday trips to the city. No one has ever returned home with bags and boxes brimful of new clothes, stark and _crispy_ new clothes that feel cool against your body.  
  
To them _this_ is life. To Shaun, if – her body nearly jerks back from the word, like she's given herself an open wound – _when_ she finds him again.  
  
Another bite of the stew. It really tastes of melon. Melon and artificial flavors and salt, always salt, this archaic way of preserving food that seems to be back in fashion in their brave new world.  
  
Preston comes to join them, smiling briefly at her across the table.  
  
“How's it going?”  
  
“Radroach stew,” she mutters back and his face cracks up in a wide grin. It does something to her, seeing people smile.  
  
“Say no more.” He helps himself to a serving and leans back in the patio chair, looking out over the small crowd that has gathered. This is something he takes pride in, Stella realizes. His little crew, the settlers he's managed to keep safe all the way from Concord and back here, to some kind of semi-safe haven. _All_ _the_ _way_ , she thinks, almost laughing at the absurdity of that notion but times have changed, the maps have cracked wide open and been torn apart and for every tiny piece of land there are a hundred horrors.  
She drinks more ale, greedy for the peace that settles in her once the alcohol has taken some sharp edges off, blurred the reality, the still-vivid outlines of her memory. Maybe that's what Mama Murphy means with the hippie bullshit about her energy; it feels as though her entire being is wrapped around this little area, her blood and bones splattered all over these empty promises of a distant past. _We were going to be safe here. We were the lucky ones._  
  
“You're going to help us build a guard tower by the bridge tomorrow, Stella?”  
  
Sturges' question tears into her thoughts and she blinks, re-orienting herself. Guard towers against a nature so fucked up by atom bombs that it's created abominations of its own, in some kind of twisted revenge. Guard towers against the apocalypse. The human fucking spirit. Indestructible.  
  
“Sure.” She nods, downing the last of her ale.  
  
When Sturges and Preston starts narrating a long-winded battle tale from before they arrived in Concord, she folds her arms across her chest and tilts her head back so she can see the stars that have appeared above them. Quiet, endless stars. They've seen it all and have no stories to tell.  
  
What a relief it must be.  
  


 


	3. Lullabies for grown-ups

 

_the Commonwealth_  
  
  
It's raining the first time Preston comes with her out on a trek through the hills and slopes just outside Concord. They're scouting the area, looking for resources; they're stalling,  _postponing_  she thinks sometimes when the impatience and grief catch up with her but it's not entirely true, of course _._  It's strategy. New plans for a new world where everything takes forever, tangled up in a web of dangers.   
  
“We'll find your kid,” Preston says as they attempt to dry their coats in front of a small fire in the abandoned street where one of the houses had a way in. A way in and a fireplace. That's as close to luxury as they get these days.   
  
Stella wrestles out of her soaking wet shirt and spreads it out on the floor. There are no words for Shaun or for  _hope_ , not yet. She merely nods.   
  
On the small table between them he puts down a pack of potato chips, two Nuka Colas and two semi-fresh apples from Sanctuary Hills. She remembers Mama Murphy had talked about how at least something grows there, remembers placing some of the produce in her bag.   
  
“Tell me about the Minutemen.” She rubs her upper arm, traces her old scar there. So long ago now even without the cryo tank; she used to contemplate getting a tattoo before they got married, cover up parts of her history. Then she got pregnant instead – unplanned,  _reluctant_  even as an honorable woman – and those plans fell into some dark corner of her memory.  
  
Preston puts down his bottle on the table with a small thud, glances sideways at her for a moment. “What do you want to know?”  
  
“Anything.” Her voice drops. “Just... words.”  
  
He nods, understands.   
  
  


* * *

  
  
  
_Oberland station_  
  
  
“So, what's it like, for you?”   
  
Preston observes her as she stirs the brown-gray sludge in the cooking pot. It's a fairly warm evening; they've shed their overcoats and installed themselves temporarily in the old station building. Walls, proper roof, mattresses that appear to be free from radroaches, oh such happy days.   
  
“For me?”  
  
“Yeah.” He nods, placing his weapons on the ground beside her. “It must be overwhelming, coming out of a vault like that.”  
  
“It's really weird,” she replies, deciding the food is about as done as it ever will be.   
  
There are days, still, when she could burst into tears just thinking about what she used to eat, how food and chocolate and liquor would blend in her mouth, intertwine and explode with flavor.   
  
Days when she wakes up from a dream, raw and vulnerable, reaching for something on her bedside table only to realize that she's sleeping on a concrete floor in an abandoned gas station. Her skin still remembers being touched by silk, by cotton, by gentle hands and warm showers; there are nights when she dreams of bubble baths and wakes up with the taste of grief in her throat. A banal sort of grief, perhaps, an ache for things rather than people and  _so_  much easier to endure.   
  
Days - far too many to count but less frequent now and steadily decreasing – spent in a haze of anger and confusion and bitterness that only turns sourer, turns inward, when she's reminded of her privilege. They froze her, healthy and sound and saved her from the hell that raged outside. It's just that she would have preferred bombs over  _this_ , but she can't say that, can't find the nerve.   
  
“It's weird and scary and confusing,” she says instead even if Preston is probably someone who'd tolerate even her worst, most ungrateful rants. “Which is what I suppose I am, too. To you people.”  
  
He holds out two metal plates in front of her and she serves the food, always a bit reluctant. Not that she had been a great or willing cook before the war, but she hadn't served stuff that looked like body fluids, at least.   
  
“Nah. You don't freak me out.” There's a brief pause, something fleeting in his expression before he smiles a little, one of those quick half-smiles he's got a large supply of. Friendly, non-intrusive. “I'm just curious, that's all. We read so much about the pre-war times but it all seems... distant.”  
  
The bombs had wiped everything out, she knows that by now. Not just the buildings and the population, but the earth-deep culture running through it all. The melting pot of familiar and foreign, of past and present, evolution and preservation, the imprints of all those that came before them like threads all across the globe. The  _hurry_ , she thinks sometimes. The frantic race towards the future, as if they already knew but tried to forget that they weren't going to be a part of it.   
  
“It was a different world back then,” she offers as they sit on their mattresses, working their way through the meal. “I was a lawyer.”  
  
Preston raises an eyebrow; he hadn't expected that, she can tell. She can't blame him, she spent the better part of adulthood not quite believing her own life, after all. “A lawyer?”  
  
“Yeah. I was raised on a small farm, way outside the city though. Got scholarships, went to college. Married a war veteran.” She swallows a large bite, washes it down with three mouthfuls of ale. Surprisingly decent ale, at that. “I'm the very model of the American dream.”  
  
He grins, a different sort of grin now, open and honest and toothy. “I guess you are.”   
  
  
  


* * *

  
  
  
_the_   _Commonwealth_  
  
  
They both reek of death and decay as they stumble towards the abandoned trailers on the way to Diamond City. All the coordinates on her pip-boy tells her it's not that far,  _finally_ , and her entire body wants to just keep walking but Preston had refused when she brought it up earlier. Actually downright  _refused_ , in a tone that she hardly associates with him, which had made her square her shoulders and bite back a  _fuck off_. But he's right, of course he's goddamn right. They can't crawl through the wastes like hungry, exhausted and injured animals.  _We're not suiciders, General._  
  
There's a bone-weariness in her tonight, a quiet ache in her back and shoulders that comes from having walked for the better part of four days now. They'd taken the settlers' advice back at Oberland station and followed the railroad but that had resulted in a few encounters with ghouls that she could have lived without for certain.   
  
“The water in the pool over there seems to be reasonably clean,” Preston says now, in his usual voice. “It's nearly dark, you want to go first?”  
  
Afterwards, when she's washed herself and her blood-and-sweat-stained clothes, he's dragged some junk from the largest trailer and rigged his rifle in a pretty elaborate way that makes her think of old movies and brings a smile to her lips for the first time in forever. Weird how she can say that these days and not exaggerate.   
  
While he cleans up she rummages around for the usual: caps, ammo, food and stims. Then she wraps her coat around her shoulders, trying to ignore the throbbing pain in her right wrist – a lingering reminder of a fall down a slope as they were hurrying away from what Preston had hissed was a building occupied by mutants.   
  
“How the  _fuck_  do you do it?” she asks when Preston returns, hair still wet and his leather coat a soaked lump in his arms.   
  
He hangs it carefully over a chair, looking at her where she sits on the floor, combing through her hair with her hand.   
  
“Do what?”  
  
“Keep yourself grounded.” Stella stares at her feet; they look small and swollen at the same time, visibly worse off after so much time in worn-down boots. And even now she _knows_ that she's lucky compared to virtually the rest of this wretched world. She's healthy, strong, made of radiation-free bones and lungs that have breathed air that was polluted but not by nuclear waste, not by the fucking apocalypse. Her scabs and bruises are nothing, _nothing_.  
  
Preston is quiet for some time and she wonders, more and more often, if he's truly as safe and dependable as he appears. As sturdy in the storm as Nate could be, even after the war had made a different man out of the cheerful guy she once knew. _He's a good man_ , people would say to her back then, because they saw it too, the changes deep in the bottom of his gaze, resting in the core of him. _He's a good man_ , they would remind her all the way to the altar, always half-expecting her to run in the opposite direction.  
  
“Not sure I do,” he replies eventually and there's a shift in his voice, a little something creeping into its layers. “No more than anyone else, at least.”  
  
"It was easier back then." Was it, really? She's not sure but it feels that way, here and now where the rain starts to trickle down the sides of this rusty old trailer. “More distractions. But I guess the principle is just the same.”  
  
They don't speak for a while, both of them wriggling into the sleeping bags like children at camp. She had never liked sharing a bedroom, not even when she first started sharing one with Nate; she's always slept best alone, undisturbed. Now it's a comfort to listen to someone else's breathing in the night, feeling the presence of another human being when she wakes up, disoriented and battle-ready.  
  
“Tell me about Boston,” Preston asks then, his voice muffled but clear enough. “She must have been a sight before the bombs.”  
  
And Stella closes her eyes and smiles to herself, for a second back in the neon lights and pleasantly arranged restaurants where you could get lobster and champagne followed by a wide range of European desserts.  
  
That night she dreams of dancing.  
  


 


	4. Freedom's just another word

  
  
They'd go down to Fenway Park at least once a year, almost as some kind of tradition or anniversary though it had always been random occurrences, at least for her. Maybe Nate kept score, asked her out on this particular date in regular intervals. She wouldn't put it past him.  
  
It used to be nice outings, one of those things she had appreciated even when she was heavily pregnant and found most things to be tiring and annoying. A game and some dinner always worked out for everyone. She'd pick a soda or a fancy drink in a bar afterward, usually some chocolate; Nate would have a beer and a burger.  
  
There had been something about the smell in these large public places, before the war. Something about the thick cocktail of perfume and sweat, liquor and cigarettes, of grass and pollution and the sweet, sugary treats being served all over the park.  
  
Diamond City smells like the rest of the Commonwealth – harsh, dry, dangerous, a punch in the throat – but she imagines there's a small hint of something else in the air here among the neon lights and unusually crowded makeshift streets. Maybe that's why people are so crazy about this place, she thinks, so _proud_ of it even if they hate it. Jewel of the Commonwealth. The bombs have left a two-hundred-year-old starvation in their wake, a desperate longing for character, for those little details that make places unique, give them heart and soul.

Even this bar, this wretched little house made of trash like the rest of Diamond City, seems to have adopted a certain _air_.  
  
“Well, I'm gonna have a quick drink.” Preston removes his hat and drops his backpack on the floor beside him. "Want one?"

Stella makes a brief analysis of the place - looks harmless enough, she decides, full of tired souls and reasonably clean surfaces - before she sits down next to him, nodding her approval. He nods back, a flash of a smile appearing on his face as he orders two shots of Bobrov's best moonshine.

There's a sour kind of bitterness in her tonight, a disappointment directed both inwards and outwards - she's angry with herself for not having made more progress, angry with the world for stalling her, with raiders for interrupting her behind every fucking corner, with mutants and freaks and ghouls and whatever else this sick parody of America has to offer. Two hundred years ago they had considered themselves gods, creators, inventors of the universe. Now this. _We deserved it._ They did. Oh, they _did_.

But all _she_ wants is to find her son and no collective hubris in the past can stop her.  
  
"We'll find Nick Valentine." Preston glances sideways at her. At the bottom of his gaze, she thinks sometimes, she can see a whole life swirl like waves, back and forth and back again, disappearing behind shadows and composure. It’s a life she knows nothing about and yet somehow she _does_ , more and more for every day they travel together. She wonders if it's the same for him, if he looks at her like a puzzle to solve, searching through her words and expressions for new pieces.  
  
Stella sighs. "Looks like we have to. No idea _how_ , though."

He looks at her for a beat, quiet and serious. _Earnest_ , she thinks. All that genuine faith he has managed to conjure up for her ever since she stumbled across his little group of refugees; there are days when she thinks he doesn't like her very much, but he always _trusts_ her. "If anyone can come up with something, I'd say it's you, General."  
  
"Three months ago I could barely aim a gun," she says, running a finger around the rim of her glass. It's not entirely true, Nate had taught her and taught her well at that but she had no actual practice because she had been a lawyer and then a mother, neither of which demanded soldier skills. She had told him the same thing when he went and made her General of the Minutemen, too. Not that it had changed anything. _Simple fact: you're a better leader than I am,_ he had said and smiled as though he was offering her a treat.  
  
"Doesn't matter," he says now, the same conviction in his voice.  
  
"Doesn't it though?" Stella frowns, the now-familiar taste of some kind of vodka substitute rests thick and heavy on her tongue. She'd kill for a gin and tonic.

"No. Maybe those things mattered before. Now it's different." He suddenly smiles, another sort of smile than the ones in passing, the half-grins that comes with comradery and mutual survival instincts. This is a quiet kind of smile and so intimate it _hurts_. She hasn't dared to form bonds to anything or anyone since she woke up, has marched forward without taking it in, without paying attention to all of the pain and the laughter around her because it weighs you down, chains you to this world that she has fought to escape. _If I care, I am lost._ “You're someone people can look up to. Heck, you even inspire me.”  
  
“You make it sound like you're hard to impress.”  
  
"Maybe I am." He shrugs. “It's just that unwillingness, sometimes, you know? If more people picked up a rifle and protected their neighbor the Commonwealth would be different.”

“Yes.” She can't argue with that; she could have before all this, for sure, but not now.  
  
“Was it like that before the war?” he asks eventually, downing the last in his glass with a quick grimace. “Man, if this really is Bobrov's _best_ I sure don't wanna taste the mediocre batch.”  
  
“Tastes better than the stuff Sturges makes at least.” Stella gives him a little smile. “And it was the same before the war, if it's any consolation.”  
  
He sighs. “Yeah, it's not.”  
  
It's not, she knows that, too. She carries that insight with her in her bones these days; but at the same time it's a dark kind of comfort, a wound of similarity running across their history even in this altered world. Human history. Full of blood and war and hatred.  
  
“People had different excuses back then. But it's always about fear. Maybe humans are always going to be scared little shits, looking to our own safety first.”  
  
Preston gives her a long, searching glance; then he goes back to studying the label on the bottle in front of them. Handwritten letters like something out of a pre-war history book. “You're not afraid.”

 _I used to be_ she thinks but clenches her teeth over that confession. Maye it's another one of those things that won't matter anymore.  
  
“Neither are you,” says instead and there's a faint kind of _light_ in his gaze when it turns towards her again, wide-open for a second and she allows herself to fall into it.

 


End file.
